Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

Everyone knows that this is how things will present themselves and that theSymbolic seen from the outside as torus, will find itself, with respect to theImaginary and the Real, will find itself having to pass above this one whichis above and below this one which is below. But what do we see byproceeding as we usually do by a cut, by a split to turn the Symbolic insideout? This Symbolic turned inside out in this way,...here is what theSymbolic turned inside out in this way will give: it will give a completelydifferent arrangement of what I called the Borromean knot, namely, that theSymbolic will totally envelop, by turning the symbolic torus inside out, willtotally envelop the Imaginary and the Real. This indeed is why the use ofthe cut with respect to what is involved in the Symbolic presents somethingwhich risks in short, at the end of a psychoanalysis, of provoking somethingwhich might be specified as a preference given above all to the unconscious.I mean that, if things are such that things are going a bit better like that asregards the life of each one, namely, to put the accent on this function, thisfunction of the knowledge of the une-bévue by which I translated theunconscious, things can effectively be better organised. But it is all thesame a structure of an essentially different nature to the one that I qualifiedas Borromean knot. The fact that the Imaginary and the Real should beentirely included, in short, in something which has come from the practiceof psychoanalysis itself, is something which gives rise to a question. Thereis here, all the same, a problem. I repeat, this is linked to the fact that it isnot when all is said and done the same thing, the structure of the Borromeanknot and what you will see there. Someone who has experienced apsychoanalysis is something which marks a passage, which marks apassage, – of course this presupposes that my analysis of the unconsciousqua founding the function of the Symbolic is completely acceptable. It isnevertheless a fact, the fact is apparently, and I can confirm it, apparentlythe fact of having gone through an analysis is something which cannot be inany case restored to the previous state, except of course by carrying out23